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Two Updates for October

(Image by the great Ron Spencer)

It’s the waning days of October and, here in the DC area, it finally feels like October. Morning air bites you on the cheek. Leaves rattle on the asphalt in slow-motion tornadoes. ALIEN ARTIFACTS has seen print. I’m still focusing on writing short stories, especially now that three new anthologies have opened for submission.

Which leads me to my first update: This year NaNoWriMo is more about getting short stories finished than anything else. I’m finishing up one, and I’ve got at least three more I hope to write over the course of the month. If nothing else, t his is going to give me a good supply of stories I can rework and shop around at a later date.

Now, is the focus on short stories a good strategic one? Well, there are a few factors here. First and foremost: writing is not my full-time job. My goals here are not economic. This means, I’m more worried about getting my name out there and being seen for producing good stories, working well with editors, and adding to my publication credits.

Will I stop work on the novel(s)? No. Working on the novels(s) have taught me a lot and I’m still learning from the experience. But the short stories are giving me something immediate to focus on while, in the background, I can think about novels in a larger, more structural framework. In either case, I keep writing.

This is the second update. It’s more a follow-up on my last entry on writing horror.

I’ve started reading short stories in alternation with my massive stack of novels. My copy of People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! came in. Silvia Garcia-Moreno’s opening essay talked about her experience watching horror films from America, or reading stories where everyone was well-off, white and trouble-free until they discovered their idyllic house is on a Native American graveyard!

She rooted for the ghosts in those cases.

I immediately thought about going to see The Ruins with some friends. We expected a trashy horror film. We didn’t expect to have the theater almost to ourselves. And what I didn’t expect was to be rooting for the carnivorous plants right from the first five minutes.

“Oh, I hope these privileged little shits die horribly.”

Most American horror falls on the conservative side of John Carpenter’s spectrum: there is evil out there come to sap our precious American bodily fluids! We must do all we can to defend our white picket fences against these terrors, be they atomic-powered ants, Satanists, or ethnic folks.

For the most part, I couldn’t take those films seriously. If the dumb teenagers got cut up, was their own fault. There’s literally a crazy old guy telling you about the murders! What do you need, a Greek oracle?

I felt more for the people in Alien and The Thing. They were just trying to survive, same as the creatures they faced. Of the suburban horror films I enjoyed, they were usually handled by Wes Craven. The Nightmare films, at their core, are all about kids paying for the secrets and lies spread by their parents. Suburbia isn’t a thing to defend – it’s a prison hiding everyone’s sins.

What happens when you sympathize with the monsters too much?

Or, think of it this way: What happens if I do start with a human I sympathize with? Someone who’s struggling to make it through the day, is happy he doesn’t get pulled aside for a more detailed search while going to a game, has depression and a mess of issues? And then I sic some terrible traumatic horror on them, destroy their world, rip them to pieces…

My first thought was, “Why isn’t this happening to his douchebag of a boss? Isn’t life tilted enough in the dudebro’s favor that even the monsters don’t go after them?”

Yeah, there’s my world of horror:

One day, the great monsters dwelling in the outer dark will see you, weighed down by stress, anxiety and the grind of surviving this world. Instead of torturing you they will just sigh, pat you on the head, hand you some antidepressants, and go to haunt the $1.4 million dollar home your boss bought for himself and his mistress while working into an early grave.

But that’s not horror then, is it? That’s just a lovely, lovely fantasy.